Transnational Film Remaking and Destabilized Meanings: Reading Kim Jee-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Abstract

Transnational remakes are created in a complex web of intertextual relations surrounded by diverse discursive influences. These specific production conditions often complicate the process of interpreting such films and reaching any definitive meanings. Kim Jee-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008) is a Korean transnational remake film that challenges signcation as such. Simultaneously styling itself after Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Lee Man-hee's Break Up the Chain (1971), the film asks us to reconsider widely accepted notions of genre and film remakes. Probing this hybrid film's entangled layers of meaning I argue that for a transnational remake such as this, different intertextual influences along with extratextual discourses constantly disturb the production of any cathartic meaning. These factors constantly affect the textual elements to be decontextualized and recontextualized in the course of interpretation, and the production of meaning itself is constantly destabilized and decentered.